Today in the New York Times Nick Kristof writes that university professors have “marginalized themselves.” We have done so, he suggests, by concerning ourselves with very specialized topics that are removed from practical realities. (Old joke: the secret to academic success is to dig an intellectual trench so narrow and so deep that there is only room for one.) The second part of the problem, Kristof suggests, is that academics write inaccessible prose, isolating their knowledge from others. He quotes approvingly Harvard historian Jill Lapore, who says academics have created “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.” Kristof’s solution is that academics do more writing for the public, on topics of practical concern. To make this change possible, universities would need to change the systems by which they evaluate faculty for promotion. I think he’s partly right. Kristof did not distinguish between faculty in Arts & Sciences and those in professional schools such as law, medicine, education, and engineering. These latter have practical application embedded in their mission and I think are therefore more vulnerable to his charges. I started writing about the application of cognitive science for teachers exactly because I thought that too many teachers were not learning this information in their training at schools of education. But for typical Arts & Sciences faculty, application is not part of the mission. I think two factors render impractical Kristof’s suggestions that it be part of the mission. I’m a scientist, so I’ll write from that perspective, and won’t claim that the following applies to the humanities. Universities and the professors they employ are best seen as part of a larger system that includes government and private industry. The seminal document envisioning that system was written by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Bush was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, through which virtually all of the scientific research for the war effort was funneled. It was plain to all that science had played a lead role in the war. The Federal government had funded scientific research at an unprecedented scale, but what was the government role to be in the coming peace? President Roosevelt asked Bush to write a report on the matter. Bush argued research can either be basic (“pure science,” which boils down to describing the world as it is) or applied (research in service of some practical goal). He argued for two points: First, that basic research lies behind the success of much practical research; e.g., the Manhattan project was a grand practical application made possible by advances in basic physics research. Second, applied research would inevitably crowd out basic research for funding because it offers short term gains. Bush concluded that the Federal Government should continue its funding of science in peacetime, and that it should focus on basic research. Industry could fund research and development for application, and it was reasonable to expect that industry would do so. The federal investment was justifiable via the pay-off in economic productivity. That’s how the National Science Foundation was born. Basic research has been housed primarily in the university system. That’s our role in the system. We’re not really here to work on applied problems. If a drug company wants to know the latest findings from molecular biology, they should hire a molecular biologist who will do the translation. This arrangement actually makes a lot more sense than academics trying to do it. Translation is more than explaining technical matters in everyday terms. It requires knowing how to exploit the technical findings in a way that serves the practical goal. For example, in education you can’t just take findings from cognitive science and pop them into the classroom, expecting kids will learn better. You need to know something about classrooms to understand how the application might work. It makes more sense for the translators to be close to the site of the application because application can take so many forms. Cognitive science has applications throughout industry, the military, health care, education, and beyond. You really need to be embedded in the locale to understand the problem that the basic science is meant to solve. So that’s why so many academics, when asked why they don’t make their work more accessible to the general public, say “that’s not my job.” We might add (and this is relevant to Kristof’s second point) that most of us are not very good at describing what we do in non-technical terms. It's a different skill set. Adding “writes well” to the criteria for promotion won’t get much traction among scientists. (The technical language that comes with any specialization adds to the problem, of course.) But again, I think Kristof’s blade is much sharper when applied to university schools that claim a mission which includes practical application. Schools of Ed., I’m looking at you.

I have both of your books and follow you Twitter and you make it easy for us to understand your research.

More profs have to get with the program.

Dan Willingham

2/16/2014 11:16:57 am

Thanks Jay!

Bryan Bazilauskas

2/16/2014 05:33:19 am

good post Daniel, your stuff always gets me thinking, and usually brings with it a unique viewpoint that has a lot of value to me as an educator.

Dan Willingham

2/16/2014 11:17:35 am

Thanks Bryan, I appreciate that :)

Barbara Hong

2/16/2014 06:15:10 am

That's the very reason why I was attracted to your writing from the beginning. Your publications are required texts for all my education majors because you write in such a comprehensible and practical way and most important of all, based on scientific evidence. Thank you for writing the way you do!

Dan Willingham

2/16/2014 11:18:06 am

Thank you, Barbara!

Rich Romo

2/16/2014 08:03:27 am

Dan,
One of my biggest gripes while working on my credential and my masters in ed was the writing. Some of it was just awful. There were some pieces that were so wordy and dense as to be incomprehensible. It's like the authors were getting paid by the word. Is there some sort of secret PhD rule that says authors can never say it with five words if there's a way to say it with 50?

Dan Willingham

2/16/2014 11:21:32 am

Rich, it's true, writing is often hard to get through. I also have to say, as a reviewer and an editor, we seldom do much to improve the prose. If people get the ideas right, you often let mediocre writing through. It's rare enough that the ideas are solid!

KenS

2/16/2014 10:38:20 am

Dr. Willingham, do you think Kristoff's comments are in any way related to the "education as preparation for work" ethos that is once again beginning to dominate our national discussion? Any education that isn't obviously useful, preferably for someone's profit, seems open to criticism.

Dan Willingham

2/16/2014 11:23:04 am

I didn't read that as an agenda (hidden or explicit) but I find that's a pretty common (if unexamined) assumption; kids go to school so to "prepare them for life" which really means "get a job."

Kevin Miller

2/16/2014 12:31:19 pm

Hi Dan, your post is a great statement of a view that I think is pretty problematic, for reasons that are very well described in Stokes' book "Pasteur's Quadrant." The problems I see are: 1) it doesn't describe reality very well (applications often lead to basic theory), 2) it lets "basic" researchers off the hook in terms of looking at problems that have real-world implications, and 3) it leads to calls for "translation research", something that has only worked in one case that I know of (admittedly a big one, with Florey & Chain and penicillin).

Stokes argues that this intellectual space is better conceived of as a 2x2 quadrant, with research looking at general principles (or not) and practical problems (or not), and he extolls Pasteur as someone who did both.

Sorry I didn't get to see you last week - hope when the snow melts we can try again...

Dan Willingham

2/16/2014 10:03:27 pm

well in truth i agree that bush's view has problems, but i think stokes' is too idealistic. I haven't make a systematic study of the thing, but i can think of more basic-->applied translations than research programs that are really in pasteur's quadrant. In "When Can You Trust the Experts" I offered Simon's distinction between natural and artificial sciences as a better way to think about this issue.

As a professor in the humanities (political science, and I consider social sciences to be humanities fields), I partly disagree with your partial agreement with Nicholas Kristof.

In political science, effectively communicating the possible applications of basic research findings to the people in government (who wield power over others in society) and citizens (subject to government power) is critical. Badly-guided officials and a badly informed citizenry is a recipe for disaster. The more accessible political scientists can make their work, the better.

I love your work, reference it often, and am going to edit my recent Active Learning in Political Science post on Kristof's subject to include a link to to your blog post -- http://activelearningps.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/siege-mentality-of-the-ivory-tower/.

Dan Willingham

2/17/2014 05:15:54 am

chad, you make a good point, and it applies to other sciences as well. . . when it comes to policy matters, scientists must weigh in. . .I'm thinking of global warming. ..

Dom

3/8/2014 07:07:48 am

It's important for policy but also for the simple reason that the public and politicians have a big influence on funding and need to be convinced of the value of research, particularly during recession and when that 'pure' research has no short term application. A few years ago my uni introduced a science communication module for phd students. I get it now, but hated it at the time!

First, my guess is that Kristof is thinking mostly about political science and sociology departments. Second, it doesn't require a radical restructuring of academia (tenure & promotion criteria, etc.) to accomplish quite a bit. It only took one Stephen Jay Gould to educate a generation about developments in paleontology and evolutionary biology---and mix in some baseball & left-wing ideology along the way. What's the harm in that? The remaining paleontologists continued doing whatever they were doing, with occasional displays of jealousy, but nothing that Gould needed to pay any mind. As someone who tries to read paleontology, without the background to do it right, I recognize the problem Kristof addresses. Here is an excerpt, which I quote in the book I am working on at the moment:

Insofar as Gerstang’s hypothesis of phylogeny within the chordates is concerned, the finding that appendicularians probably branch more basally than ascidians requires a revision of the presumed ancestral chordate. One solution is just to switch the ancestral chordate from an ascidian to an appendicularian larva. In this case, there need be little change in the notion of a paedomorphic chordate ancestor. Appendicularians would represent a pelagic descendant of the founding deuterostomes, perhaps sister to the enteropneusts. In an alternative evolutionary model, the adult appendicularian ancestor could have given rise to crown appendicularians and to cephalochordates. This scenario obviates any requirement for a paedomorphic origin of the chordate bodyplan.

And whatever this means, it all changes every five years or so.

dan willingham

2/17/2014 05:18:47 am

I agree, there don't need to be many of them in the academy (and no reason why someone writing good popular press books on paleontology needs to be an academic)

EB

2/17/2014 04:45:55 am

I can see why you direct your attention to disciplines that have well-recognized practical applications. Still think that some of the other disciplines should (for their own benefit) reward writing that is accessible to the public. Scholarly writing in literature is just as awful as the example given above (paleontology). And for less reason; at least the more scientific disciplines have a reason to have the vocabularies that they use. Writers on literature could easily avoid their more tortured vocabularies and concepts.

I happened to be reading William Zinsser's book "writing to learn" when the Kristof op-ed appeared. He describes the link between clear thinking and clear writing. He also suggests the study of great writers from different fields.

Mike G

2/17/2014 09:59:14 pm

Dan, enjoyed the blog.

It seems like Ed Schools mostly produce applied knowledge, no? And that concern is more about relevance, utility, and accuracy of that applied knowledge. (I'm tempted to use scare quotes around knowledge).

Is there much basic research in the Ed School context?

I scanned a list of Harvard GSE topics, and I'm not sure what one would call Basic.

Hi Dan,
Thanks for sharing the link. I wonder if there's a more important point that's being missed in this discussion: professors who can't communicate the value of what they do to society risk being well-adapted to a dying system.

I have no doubt that basic research, e.g. physical and social sciences research, will continue to be funded. Those who attract their own funding will always have a home in universities.

But regardless of how one fancies oneself, most college professors are not truly basic researchers. Most are semi-teaching faculty, semi-student-advising faculty, and semi-research faculty.

And tenured faculty positions are an expensive way to "buy" each of these services.

Publish or perish may be the longstanding reality, but the looming reality is more stark: prove your value to society at large, or to a specific funder audience, or risk being replaced by videos, adjuncts, grad students, or nothing at all.

Publishing papers nobody understands to journals nobody reads may be the way to get tenure now, but it's hardly the way to ensure the sustainability of one's job category in a rapidly changing (but slow-to-adapt) industry.